18 December 2010

I've decided that I'm going to learn about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) over this Holiday break. I've read a few articles, listened to a few podcasts so I have an idea what it's about, just haven't actually gone thru the motions myself.

What am I going to do with a virtual machine (VM) in the cloud? Not much quite yet. I have some ideas but first need to figure out how things work.

I started an plain vanilla Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI) just to get things going and verify that I could SSH into the thing per the getting started guide. But when I SSH'd, nothing, nada, zip. Timeout.

This darn thing acts like it's not running. I started, restarted, used different AMI, mucked with security group setting without any progress. I even edited the default security group to open the thing wide open:

Still nothing. Did the google thing to see what other people are doing and came across a few hits in the Amazon Web Services forums where people are claiming the the web services aren't starting up correctly in the US-East zone. Hey, that's me! Ok, I'm not stupid, its just some tech problem. I'll take a break and try it again in a few hours.

Few hours later: nothing, nada, zip. Ok, I am stupid. I can't even log into a stupid instance. I probably started/stopped an EC2 AMI 10 times but can't do anything with it. This new thing I've learned is frickin' amazing.

And as usual, as soon as I've convinced myself that all hope is lost, ding. Wait, doesn't my Westell DSL modem block SSH? Oh, frick of course it does. Damn it so, the last 3-4 hours of trouble was caused by my own firewall??

Of course it was. I really hate this Verizon provided modem and keep telling myself that I'm going to buy a different one. But this is free and I'm cheap. So I'll keep shooting myself in the foot and someday get smarter and dump this junk.

In the Firewall->Port Forwarding menu, I just added the SSH service to a dynamic host.

And now when I launch a new instance, I get this:

Amazing. Only hours and hours of work to launch and connect. Let the fun begin.

29 November 2010

"... resources in the system could be used to transport messages at minimal cost. However, it was necessary to limit the length of the messages to 128 bytes (later improved to 140 bytes, or 160 seven-bit characters) so that the messages could fit into the existing signaling formats."

403:The request is understood, but it has been refused. An accompanying error message will explain why.
{"request":"\/1\/direct_messages\/new.json","error":"The text of your direct message is over 140 characters."}
TwitterException{exceptionCode=[6bcd7469-01bff100], statusCode=403, retryAfter=0, rateLimitStatus=null, version=2.1.7}

That kinda says that I can send 140 characters, so what's this nonsense about a 90 character limit?

But check this out. By adjusting my direct message, I find that a 90 character message is the sweet spot for a 15 character screen name and the message is sent as a single text. 91 characters will cause the message to be split over 2 texts.

Maybe that header and footer isn't as big as I think it is.

140 - 90 = 50 characters for header/footer?

If a screen name is used twice (2 * 15 = 30), then maybe the bloat is only 20 characters?

What happens if I send messages to a different screen name, one that is smaller than 15 characters?

What is I use a screen name of 8 characters? Should I be able to send a message of

140 - 20 (bloat) - (2 * 8) = 104 characters?

After a quick reassignment of my phone to a different twitter account, I tried a test with a screen name that is 8 characters. Could I send 104? Durn right I could! And I could also send 109. But 110 would cause a message split. So I have an extra 5 characters unaccounted for.

What happens if I send to a ... No, this is going on too long.

The max screen name is 15 characters and that limits the max amount of data that can be sent in one message to 90 characters.

If the screen name is less than 15 characters, then you get 90 plus some extra. YMMV

27 November 2010

Writing code to send an SMS text message is fairly easy on a smart phone like an Android. But from a desktop, sending texts is still a mess, not always free, and/or requires a phone connected to your server.

I simply want to send a message to my phone when my app receives some data. I don't need a complex library with lots of setup nor do I want to sign up for a pay service.

Now this isn't the cleanest solution to text from an app but Twitter can send messages to your phone when people you follow update their status, when someone mentions or replies to you, or when you get a direct message.

Come on, man! What used to a be a simple task to send a tweet is now a OAuth nightmare.

A year or so ago, I built that tweet-a-w/e thing that sniffed XBee chirps and sent them to a twitter account that kindly routed them to my cell phone.

I have a need now to receive an XML stream, parse out a few tidbits and then send the results out as a SMS text message. Remembering that tweet-a-w/e app, I thought that I would again leverage Twitter to send the text message. All I need to do is send a tweet via a Twitter API and have my account set up to send the content to a phone number.

This time my XML receiver is in Java/Groovy, so I grabbed the latest Twitter4J, glanced at the UpdateStatus example and tried a quick test with Groovy.

What the heck? Basic Authentication is not supported? Darn it, what is this stupid OAuth thing about? Here's the Twitter page "Authenticating Requests with OAuth" that looks real interesting to read. Arghhhhh. I just want to send a flippin' tweet, I really don't have time to research this at Hueniverse.

After some more quick Googling, this isn't as bad as it first looks.It boils down to getting a key and secret pair. The steps are:

13 August 2010

After a little more than a year of ownership and the main reason that I haven't been updating my blog, I sold my Boxster (the Great White). She was a good car but after buying a 911 in early Spring, I just wasn't driving her much.

My family is much sadder than me though cause they liked the Boxster better than the 911.

I really love the mid-engine Boxster and will probably buy a Cayman S in the near future. After getting the Porsche bug, I wasn't happy until I had a 911. What a complete different experience. The Boxster is refined and hugs the curves like no other car I ever driven. The 911 is raw, loud and dares you to give it too much gas so it can swing its ass around and make you look like a noob driver. But it's so fast and the power is addicting.

09 August 2010

Santa brought my game player son a Sanyo SP2664 26-inch Widescreen LCD HD Television last Christmas. A few months into the year, the TV started getting occasional white lines diagonally across the screen, the greens looked weird, and then the audio went in/out. I could've/should've hauled it back to Wally Mart but grumbled about it and did nothing.

We came home from our July 4th vacation and the darn TV is dead. White Screen of death. No sound, just a stupid looking white screen.

According to the thread, "it has been reported that there is a defective ribbon cable that causes this problem". And the possible fix is "Clean glue like material from spaced further apart trace of FFC ribbon or replace the ribbon wire P/N: N6CD FFC".

Well, I'm pleased to report that we hacked and smashed and tore that darn TV up, finally got to the elusive cable. And it looks nothing like that picture. Our cable looked fine, no glue, seemed like a good connection. And the TV remains broken and in 300-bazillion parts.

We had fun exploring the TV but it would have been a better story if the darn thing would have actually been easy to fix. I think our TV had more wrong with it than just the cable. But if your TV is showing the white screen of death, read the link and good luck.